Late last week, Nokia dropped what many consider to be a bomb on the WebM project: a list of patents that VP8 supposedly infringes in the form of an IETF IPR declaration. The list has made the rounds around the web, often reported as proof that VP8 infringes upon Nokia's patents. All this stuff rang a bell. Haven't we been here before? Yup, we have, with another open source codec called Opus. Qualcomm and Huawei made the same claims as Nokia did, but they turned out to be complete bogus. As it turns out, this is standard practice in the dirty business of the patent licensing industry.

Of course it wasn't a "cock-up" when their lawyers wrote explicitely "proprietary technology such as Ogg": it was FUD, a claim that Ogg was patent-encumbered. They claimed it, and it was on purpose.

I do not see how you can use the rest of Nokia's argument to change the meaning: all I see is

-"we made our egoistical solution by choosing a proprietary solution in which we have an interest as we have invested in it and can collect royalties from it, so in our interest, don't choose another option",

-"disregard that we failed in the past to make it royalty-free to make it acceptable to everybody else but us, next time it will work",

-""free" is a lie, look, we put weasel quotes around it, also we assert that Ogg is proprietary and it is so obvious we do not feel the need to develop here"...